inSite is a service and plugin for WordPress that gives your website the ability to change itself, or perform an action, depending on when and how it is being accessed. By using information, such as the location of your visitors, what device they are using, and what time of day it is, you can use this plugin to instruct your website to perform an action, based on that information.

The actions and changes that can be triggered with InSite are pretty interesting, as well as being useful for a range of different types of WordPress website.

To find out exactly what this content personalization plugin can do, and to get some ideas of how you could make use of it, read on for our inSite for WordPress review.

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What Can the inSite Content Personalization WordPress Plugin Do?

inSite gives you the ability to create recipes –called inSites – which are used to personalize your website, or perform a certain action. These recipes are activated based on pre-determined triggers.

The type of triggers you can use with inSite currently includes: time and/or date, number of visits to the site, URL parameters, device type, and physical location. These triggers can be used individually, or combined to build some pretty powerful recipes. You can also create custom triggers with JavaScript.

Some examples of how you could use inSite on your website includes: showing a specific piece of content to new visitors, or welcome back messages to returning visitors. Displaying location specific content to visitors depending on their location is another good use for inSite, as is displaying seasonal decoration and content on your website, based on the time of day or year. Custom content can also be displayed based on the visitor’s device.

As well as creating your own recipes through the inSite user interface, you can also choose from the growing library of pre-built recipes. Some interesting examples of these existing recipes include: displaying a reservation form if a visitors comes to your restaurant website on a weekend, displaying a ‘contact us’ button to new visitors, and displaying a map depending on the visitor’s location and if they are using a mobile device or not.

inSite has been built to be as developer-friendly as possible, with the aim of making it easy for coders to create their own custom triggers for use in their recipes. These custom triggers and recipes can be shared with the community, by agreeing to upload them to the inSite website.

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Customizing your website to deliver personalized content to your visitors has the potential to increase user engagement and improve conversion rates, and hopefully, you can see how you could use this type of functionality on your website.

However, this all sounds pretty complicated, so let’s take a look to see how user-friendly the inSite plugin and service is.

Using the inSite Plugin to Trigger Changes on Your WordPress Website

It’s worth pointing out that inSite is still in beta mode. However, the plugin is available freely from the WordPress.org plugin directory, allowing you to try it on your website today.

After you’ve activated the plugin on your website, you can view all the available recipes from within your admin dashboard area.

The recipes can be filtered by their triggers, helping you to find time, device, location, or visitor based recipes. The library can be filtered by category, such as promotions, ecommerce, blogging, or restaurant and bars. Again this helps you to quickly find the most relevant recipes for your needs.

You can also filter the recipe library according to your goal or intention. This could include making an announcement, displaying a promotion, generating leads, or increasing conversions.

After you’ve found an inSite or recipe that you want to use, you can add it to your site, and then begin configuring it to work in the way that you want. Depending on the recipe you chose, the settings and options on offer will vary.

When applying the Facebook notification, for example, you get the option of choosing which parts of your site the notification is displayed.

With this recipe, you also get the ability to customize the appearance and content of the notification bar.

If you want, you can also customize the underlying JavaScript code of the trigger. This gives you the option of personalizing the recipe to better meet your needs.

Once you are happy with the recipe, you can activate it for use on your website. You can also preview the trigger at this point to see how it works.

Before setting a recipe live on your website, you will need to create a free account with inSite. After applying at least one recipe on your site, you can then view and manage all the recipes you have running, through the inSites areas of your WordPress dashboard.

The My inSites area makes it easy to see which recipes have been added to your site, with the ability to quickly stop or restart them.

Building Your Own inSite Recipe

As well as choosing from the selection of pre-built recipes available to inSite users, you can also create your own. This takes places through the plugin area on your WordPress admin dashboard.

The first step when creating your own recipe, is to choose an action, and decide what will be displayed on your website once the trigger conditions are met. The three choices cover displaying a new element or section on your site, displaying a notification bar, or applying some kind of special effect. These special effects cover visuals such as fireworks, or falling leaves. Advanced users can enter their own JavaScript to create a custom action.

After making your choice, you can then move on to the next stage. At this point you can customize your action. By choosing the new element action, you can then create the new page element that will be displayed, once the trigger conditions are met.

As you can see, when working on your custom action, you get a front end preview of your design to help you envision how it will look to your visitors. Clicking on the elements allows you to edit their content and appearance.

You can also configure the element to only display on certain pages, or before and after a specific selector. You can also change its layout to better suit your needs, plus a whole lot more. The builder also includes an image editor to help you customize any images you include in your elements.

Once you are happy with the appearance of your new element, you can then move onto the triggers section. From this screen you can choose one or more triggers that will be used to control the visibility of your element.

The next step is to enter the details of the triggers, defining how they will work in your recipe.

Finally you can give your inSite recipe a name and description, before activating it on your site. You also have the option of making your custom recipe available to the inSite community.

Conclusion

Recipe building services like IFTTT have already proved popular with WordPress users. Now inSite aims to bring this same functionality directly to your WordPress website with this free plugin.

While this is a newly released tool, it does look very promising. There is already a good number of recipes available in the library to choose from, although creating your own inSites is very straightforward. While you don’t know need to know JavaScript to create your own recipes, if you do, then this opens up a whole new world of possibilities.

Although many of the recipes, such as notification bars, pop-ups, and other actions, can be added to your WordPress website by installing a purpose built plugin, inSite gives you a large library of recipes to choose from, simply by installing one free plugin. Not only that, but the inSite recipes can be easily customized to better meet your requirements – something that isn’t always possible with other plugins.

If you want to trigger changes on your WordPress website in order to deliver personalized content, then the recipes on offer from inSite are well worth checking out.

Joe has been using WordPress for many years and spends his time creating content for a wide range of websites and blogs. If you need compelling content for your blog, visit his freelance services portfolio now.